I have a Debian Linux host and a Windows XP Pro guest. I have the guest's NIC bridged to the NIC on the host. The host is also running Samba and I have a drive mapped from the host inside the guest. When I install an Intel Pro1000/MT sever adapter or an Intel Pro100 desktop adapter in the host, network performance from the guest to this share is terrible (100 minutes to transfer 300 MB estimated). When I install any other NIC, the transfer is fine (1 minute/300 MB). And actually, I can bridge the guest to the differnt adapter and still have bad performance. I have to physically remove the Intel NIC from the host so the driver is not loaded to get normal netowrk performance.
I have tried using the AMD and the e1000 virtual devices in the guest config. Both behave the same way. This has persisted across all VMware Server betas that I've tried back to 20925. I have been updating the tools as needed inside the guest during migrations to the latest beta.
Why just the Intel NICs? I'd rather use them over the Broadcom NICs I have due to noticably better gigabit performance on my LAN.